Pat Graney challenges frontiers of dance and sexuality

THE PAT GRANEY COMPANY

Choreography by Pat Graney.

Presented by Dance Umbrella.

Emerson Majestic Theatre,

Thursday, November 16.

By MARK ROBERTS

PAT GRANEY LIKES TO CHALLENGE conventions. The three pieces her company
is presented for their Boston premiere at the Emerson Majestic Theatre all
did so in different ways. The first, Five/Uneven, with five
performers on five sets of asymmetric bars, challenged the very definitions
of the art form, straddling the boundary between dance and sport. Her
provocation went beyond purely artistic questions, however, and in the
second and third dances one finds one's attitudes to children probed, and a
monolith of Western American culture -- country and western music --
subverted in a challenge to conventional sexual attitudes.

This made for an evening that was always interesting, although sometimes
emotionally distant when the concern with form or intellectual significance
became more than the aesthetic power of the piece could carry. At its best,
as in Jesus Loves the Little Cowgirls, the country and western
piece, Graney's choreography was witty and had some of the beguiling
fluency of the movement of children playing. It could also suggest a
powerful menace, as in the first two pieces.

The women who performed Five/Uneven, (three of them, sisters,
known as "The Flying Garcias") all competed as gymnasts before joining
Graney's company. They were a far cry from the Comaneci- or Korbet-like
sylphs that are many people's stereotype of the female gymnast, however.
When they swung in unison, the overwhelming impression was of physical
power. Where competitive gymnastic routines on the bars usually last for a
couple of minutes, Five/Uneven was 25 minutes long, and the strength
required to sustain almost continual movement through this was palpable and
awe-inspiring.

The sets of bars were arranged on stage in a row of three at the front
and two at the back, so that the mesh of taut wires holding them up formed
a lattice encasing the dancers. The sense of formality and discipline was
enhanced by the measured movements with which they prepared for the piece,
kneeling to apply chalk and then a fine spray of water from a bottle to
their bandaged hands before hauling themselves aloft and into position for
the music to start. There was a sense of the closeness that unites teams of
athletes and troupes of dancers in this ritual preparation.

Of all the dances, this was the most purely formal, devoid of the
specific clues and messages of the other two, and the one in which the
audience was the least allowed to feel involved. The music, by Arturo Peal,
was unremarkable, repetitive synthesizer patterns, but one's attention was
focused on the performers. Their movements attempted to define a new
geometry of the human body, tracing circles with their mighty loops around
the two bars, like Leonardo da Vinci's scowling Renaissance man treading
his circular and rectilinear boundaries. Space was measured in limb
lengths, with the joints bracing angles. Almost every movement was
necessary as part of the construction and domination of this new space;
there was only one gesture that was purely expressive in the manner of a
traditional dancer -- a momentarily raised hand -- the rest were part of
larger physical movements.

The dancers faces expressed little emotion, but their exertion was
evident. The sense of discipline that pervaded the piece was evident here,
too, producing an unsettling effect. The sense was of an almost military
precision, single-minded and unwavering in a unity of suprasexual power.

The queasy sexuality suggested in the first piece was taken further in
Prince and Princess, which followed it. Four dancers, three women
and one man, dressed in the frilly skirts and petticoats or -- for the man
-- the short pants of little children dressed up in their Sunday best,
cavorted through a gruesome parody of play. The poses around which the
piece was built were taken from children's fashion advertising, and the
insidious sexual provocation of their coquetry is grotesquely brought out
by having adults perform them. The women flicked up their skirts and
flashed their knickers; the man strutted about. The piece accelerated, and
horror began to intrude as the cycle of poses was performed in ever quicker
succession to the point where it appeared as a kind of neurotic tic. The
tic then spilled into outright paroxysm, with the dancers jerking
spastically on the floor. The piece was chilling and effective, confronting
our complicity with the abuse of children's sexuality by the media.

The last piece, Jesus Loves the Little Cowgirls, was far lighter
in tone, but nonetheless masked considerable sexual challenge. Set to the
syrupy soul stirrings of Patsy Cline, The Judds, and Belinda Carlisle, the
four female dancers, dressed in the deliciously campy "cowgirl" uniforms of
the cheerleaders of Sam Houston State University in Texas, acted out the
passions and gunfights of life as it was lived in the mythical West. But
while some of the movements would look quite at home in a drill display,
the piece was laced with a lesbian feeling that would deeply unsettle the
sort of red-blooded cowboy being sung about. The heartfelt emotion that is
the stock in trade of C & W was hijacked from its resolutely heterosexual
context and applied to the struggles of lesbian relationships, in a move
that was very amusing and managed to be genuinely moving. The dancing was
quickfire, like a children's game of cowboys, with the fingers poised as
six-shooters, dramatic sprawling deaths, and lots of leaps across stage.
Then it switched to the tightest of Texas two-steps, the women dancing in
gimlet-eyed couples, breaking into spreadlegged somersaulting, with just
the slightest flicker of a complicit grin as one of

the little cowgirls rose from between her partner's thighs.

Although this last piece left the audience laughing, the laughter was
tinged with the same unsettledness that all Pat Graney's challenging work
instilled.